Greg Priest

William O. Douglas was born OTD in 1898. For profit corporations are legally cognizable “persons.” It should be so too for “valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology.” 🌱🐋🧪🌎

And here (free): jhiblog.org/2017/11/13/w... 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #psychsky #evobio 🧪

Indeed, years before Genealogy of Morals, Darwin had argued that our moral principles had evolved from social instincts. I wrote about that here (paywall): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf 🌱🐋 #HistSTM #philsci #psychsky #evobio 🧪

Friedrich Nietzsche was born OTD in 1844. He derided Darwin’s theory, but On Truth and Lies explores the human mind as evolved. And Genealogy of Morals treats the evolution (“genealogy”) of our moral principles as more deeply revealing than their content. 🌱🐋 #histSTM #philsci #psychsky #evobio 🧪

Hannah Arendt was born OTD 1906. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world … is being destroyed.” #PoliSky #PhilSky

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published OTD in 1979. Douglas Adams: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” #litsci 🐡 #BookSky

I analyzed this cartoon as an example of the “march of progress” image in my essay review “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkeys.” link.springer.com/article/10.1... There’s a paywall. DM me if interested. #HistSTM 🦋🦫🐋🌱🧪#PhilSci

OTD in 1881, Charles Darwin published his last book, on earthworms. It reflected a long interest in animal minds: “One alternative alone is left, namely, that worms, although standing low in the scale of organization, possess some degree of intelligence.” 🧪 🌱🐋🦋🦫 #HistSTM #philsci #pschsky #cogsci

OTD in 1905, Henry Fairfield Osborn named Tyrannosaurus Rex, the king of the tyrant lizards. The specimen was collected by Barnum Brown in the Hell Creek formation in Montana. Below are the first published image of T. rex and a photo of the fossil being removed from the quarry. 🐋🌱⚒️🧪 #HistSTM

OTD in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. #polisky

OTD in 1836, HMS Beagle docked at Falmouth, after a 5 year voyage. Charles Darwin wrote in his diary, “To my surprise and shame, I confess the first sight of the shores of England inspired me with no warmer feelings, than if it had been a miserable Portuguese settlement.” 🌱🐋🧪#HistSTM #STS

OTD in 1838, Charles Darwin read Malthus’s Principles of Population “for amusement.” The idea of a “war of nature” was venerable, but D realized that such a war would tend to remove deleterious variations from populations. Natural selection would necessarily follow. 🌱🐋🧪#HistSTM #philsci 📈📉#evolbio

L: Color print magazine advertisement for Pennsalt DDT products. This ad appeared in Time Magazine, June 30, 1947. Science History Institute. R: Photo of children being spayed with DDT in a public swimming pool. Date and photographer unknown. 🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published OTD in 1962. “[W]e have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” 🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866. If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it." 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

The pioneering aquarist Jeanne Villepreux-Power was born OTD in 1794. She was the first to record that some species of octopuses could use tools to pry open their prey's shells. She observed them waiting for the clam to open its shell and then jamming In a rock. 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Samuel Johnson was born OTD in 1709. Selecting one quote from my notes was a challenge, but here goes: “Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.” #PhilSky

OTD in 1854, Charles Darwin began sorting his notes in preparation for writing a treatise with the working title “Natural Selection.” He would never publish the book, instead publishing a short “abstract”—titled “On the Origin of Species”—in 1859. 🐋🌱 #HistSTM #evolbio 🧪

OTD in 1854, Charles Darwin began sorting his notes in preparation for writing a treatise with the working title “Natural Selection.” He would never publish the book, instead publishing a short “abstract”—titled “On the Origin of Species”—in 1859. 🐋🌱 #HistSTM #evolbio 🧪

Eunice Foote conducted an experiment showing that atmospheric CO2 traps heat. OTD in 1856, she listened to a man (John Henry of the Smithsonian) present her results to the American Acad. for the Advancement of Science. Henry downplayed the significance of Foote’s finding. #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM 🧪🌎

Thomas Lovejoy was born OTD in 1941 “Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people.... [But] the choice is not between wild places or people, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Donald Griffin, discoverer of bat echolocation, was born OTD 1915. I imagine “small mammals enough like ourselves to feel that I could understand what their lives would be like, and yet different enough to make it a sort of adventure and exploration to see what they were doing.” 🐋🌱🧪 #HistSTM

J-B Lamarck was born OTD in 1744 A “prime cause … endows animal life with the power to make organization gradually more complex…. Occasionally a foreign, accidental, and therefore variable cause has interfered with the execution of the plan, without, however, destroying it.” 🐋🌱🧪🗃️🧠 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Ruin a book by adding a word: My first thought was The Old Man and the Sea Horse. But then I realized I’d totally want to read that. Maybe it’s a sequel to Remarkably Bright Creatures?

Ruin a book by adding a word: The Longest Yard Sale

Rosalind Franklin was born OTD in 1920. Her X-ray crystallography was key to discovering DNA’s structure (her student Raymond Gosling took photo 51). She also studied viruses. After her untimely death, a colleague Aaron Klug continued her work and won a Nobel. 🌱🐋🧪 #EvoBio #HistSTM #WomeninSTEM

Edward Hopper was born on this day in 1882. “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” Room in New York (1932) 🐡 #PhilSci (and, yes, I think that’s an appropriate feed for this)

OTD in 1925 John Scopes was found guilty of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee statute that forbade the teaching of "any theory … that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The trial was as much an effort to bring tourist money into Dayton TN as anything else. 🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

The letters by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace had been read before the Linnean Society. OTD in 1858, D abandoned the “Big Species Book” he had been working on and began a short “abstract” of his theory. It would go on to be published as On the Origin of Species. 🌱🐋🧪🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #EvoBio

Multi-talent Robert Hooke, who launched microscopy, was born 18 July 1635 #histsci #histtech thonyc.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/m...

Thomas Kuhn was born OTD in 1922. Historicity—over revolutions and paradigms—was core to his thought. “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” 🦋🦫🧠🗃️ #HistSTM #PhilSci

Vilfredo Pareto was born OTD in 1848. His most famous quote is: "Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself." But he never said it: quoteinvestigator.com/2024/08/02/f... 🧪🦋🦫 #PhilSci #HistSTM 📉📈

Walter Benjamin was born OTD in 1892. “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” #PhilSky 🧠🗃️

Cormac McCarthy was born OTD in 1933. 🌱🐋🐡 #BookSky

Just came across this, on the lemon: “Lemons are symbols, ciphers, ingredients; conduits for meaning and metaphors; little cathedrals, fruit for dreaming.” It comes from Jennifer Higgie’s meditation on the lemon as culinary, literary, and art historical object, via Yotam Ottolenghi.

Ernst Mayr was born OTD in 1904. “Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic.” 🧠🗃️🌱🐋🦋🦫🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci

Franz Kafka was born OTD in 1883. "[T]he right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other." The Trial #PhilSky #PhilSci #BookSky

OTD in 1858, papers by Darwin and Wallace proposing transmutation of species by natural selection were read to the Linnean Society. Its president later noted that 1858 had not seen any “discoveries which at once revolutionize … the department of science on which they bear.” 🐋🌱🗃️🧠🧪 #HistSTM #EvoBio

Joseph D. Hooker was born OTD in 1817. Darwin’s best friend, and the period’s greatest botanist. Like D, H feuded with Richard Owen. O sought to bring H’s Kew Botanic Gardens under the authority of O’s British Museum, accusing H of “attaching barbarous binomials to foreign weeds.” 🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

Anne Carson was born OTD in 1950. “Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” “Swimming has a stoniness, water being as different from air as stones.” #BookSky #Poetry

Carlo Ginzburg, a founding figure in microhistory, has died. May his memory be a blessing. 🧠🗃️ www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/b...

Yes! And we have one of those models (and more) at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA: www.computerhistory.org/collections/...

Babbage would later use a model of the Difference Engine to show that what we perceive as miracles are better understood as consequences of laws of nature we don’t fully understand. He proposed the origin of new species of plants and animals as an example of this. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪 #PhilSci

OTD in 1822, a letter from Charles Babbage proposing the construction of a “Difference Engine” for the automated calculation of mathematical functions was read before the Royal Astronomical Society of London. #HistSTM 🐋🌱🧪🦫🦋

English landscape painter John Constable was born OTD in 1776. "Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.  Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments." 🧪🐋🌱🐡#philsci #HistSTM

On the role that diagramming played in Crick and Watson’s contributions to the structure of DNA--and on diagrams as epistemic tools in science and math more generally--see www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... (paywall). 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

Francis Crick was born OTD in 1916. We've all seen the DNA diagram that appeared in Crick and Watson’s Nature paper (left), but have you seen his sketch (right), from which his wife Odile made the published version? 🌱🐋🧪🐡 #EvoBio #HistSTM

My blog post on Darwin’s reimagining of sympathy is here: https://www.jhiblog.org/2017/11/13/what-if-humans-were-raised-like-bees-charles-darwin-and-the-evolution-of-morality/ My article on the same (paywall) here: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/676147/pdf 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

Darwin later reconceived S’s sympathy” through an evolutionary lens, making morality more contingent and more widely distributed through the animal kingdom, than S had imagined. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio

Stewart pointed to Smith’s account of the development of human languages as an instance, but the epithet might equally be applied to Smith’s account of the evolution of moral principles out of our innate human faculty of “sympathy” with our fellows. 🐋🌱🦋🦫🧠🧪 #HistSTM #PhilSci #Evobio